Labor unions are leading the anti-ICE resistance, but they once opposed immigration

American unions, once wary of — or even outright hostile — to immigration because of its threat towards American wages and bargaining power, are now at the forefront of the anti-ICE protests opposing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns.

Since President Donald Trump took office last year, several of America’s most prominent unions, like the Service Employees International Union, United Auto Workers, and others under the AFL-CIO umbrella, have opposed deportations of illegal immigrants and other ICE operations through general strikes, protests, and workplace training.

Aligned with left-wing entities

Oftentimes, these unions partner closely with radical leftist organizations to do so, such as the radical Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Marxist People’s Forum, the Revolutionary Communists of America, and local chapters of the Communist Party USA, as Just the News has previously documented. 

Unions under the AFL-CIO umbrella have been instrumental in organizing strikes across the country to protest Trump administration deportation operations. AFL-CIO even provides a tracking map for users to identify workers’ strikes organized by its affiliates. 

The union umbrella has sharply criticized the deportation actions, claiming they put “innocent” workers in danger and also called on ICE to leave Minnesota after the shooting deaths of two individuals that federal authorities say were impeding operations. 

"America's unions join the call for ICE to immediately leave Minnesota before anyone else is hurt or killed. We demand local authorities conduct a full, transparent investigation that will lead to accountability for this tragic and violent act, and for Congress to use its power to hold ICE accountable,” AFL-CIO said in a statement after the second shooting, which left Alex Pretti dead. 

Pretti, a healthcare worker, was a member of the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO umbrella.

The union group is part of an alliance of union and leftists political organizations that ordered a general workers’ strike in Minneapolis following the shootings, Just the News reported last month. 

The strike was announced by ICE Out Now and was sponsored by many local AFL-CIO affiliates. The plans for the Jan. 23 shutdown, which attracted thousands, included “a unified statewide pause in daily economic activity” including “no work (except emergency services),” “no school,” and “no shopping or consumer spending.”

Affiliated unions, like the SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa, have also organized trainings for healthcare workers to “Know-Your-Rights” when dealing with ICE and demand “ICE out of healthcare.”  

Unions: "ICE creating fear, chaos and violence"

“We are facing an unprecedented crisis. Federal ICE agents are creating fear, chaos, and violence in our community and interfering with our ability to care for patients,” one event graphic posted by SEIU reads. 

The “critical and confidential” trainings were described as addressing “what to do if ICE shows up at our facilities, understand our legal rights, and discover how we can force employers to protect us and our patients.” 

SEIU, which is one of the largest unions in the United States and represents employees in the service sector and healthcare sectors, has been at the center of several rounds of anti-ICE protests since last summer. 

Last June, protests erupted in Los Angeles after targeted immigrations raids in the city. SEIU’s California branch president, David Huerta was arrested becasue he alleged blocked a vehicle and he was charged by prosecutors with conspiracy to impede a federal officer. SEIU said in a statement that Huerta was “peacefully bearing witness to a ruthless raid” when he was “assaulted and violently detained by ICE.” 

After the initial demonstrations, which remained peaceful, the anti-ICE protests escalated over the weekend to include more than 1,000 rioters filmed assaulting immigration officers, burning self-driving vehicles, temporarily closing down at least one city highway, and throwing concrete rocks at law enforcement officers, Just the News previously reported. 

Yet, the vigorous activism against the Trump administration’s enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws is a far cry from the positions once advocated by the nation’s most powerful unions, who often viewed illegal immigration as a threat to legal workers’ wages and bargaining power. 

Unions' reversal of policy

“Over its long history, few issues have caused the American labor movement more agony than has the issue of immigration,” Vernon Briggs, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics, School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University testified to Congress in 2007, just as the new, pro-immigrant stance of American labor unions was taking shape. 

Organized labor is presented with a dilemma, he said. “If it seeks to place restrictions on immigration as well as to press for serious enforcement of its terms, the labor movement risks alienating itself from those immigrants who do enter (legally or illegally) and do find jobs which may make it difficult to organize them.” 

If, however,  “they support permissive or expansionary immigration admission policies and/or lax enforcement against violators of their terms,” the increasing availability of labor can crowd out the market and undercut economic benefits for existing membership, Briggs said. 

The earliest American unions chose the former. The National Labor Union, one of the earliest labor associations in the United States, lobbied for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which imposed a 10-year ban on immigration from China, specifically targeted at laborers, who American groups believed were undercutting wages. The act was later made permanent by the turn of the century before being repealed during the Second World War. 

By the early 20th Century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL)–which still wields influence today as AFL-CIO–had a decidedly anti-immigration bent in its earliest days under the leadership of founding President Samuel Gompers. 

AFL lobbied for a literacy test for immigrants, and two national bills, the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 that together imposed the first ceiling on immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere. The history of Gompers’ tenure is still acknowledged by the union today, despite its drastic policy evolution to date. 

Labor hero Chavez fought illegal immigration

In one of the most famous historical cases, the United Farm Workers union, led by labor hero Cesar Chavez, took a firm stance against illegal immigration, blaming it for undercutting the bargaining power of legal migrant and other workers. Often, illegal Mexican workers would be used to break strikes by the UFW, leading Chavez to encourage members to form an informal border patrol force, called wet lines, to attempt to stop Mexcian workers from entering the United States. 

It was the leadership of SEIU’s California branch that is credited with shifting standard position on illegal immigration within the American unions, most especially Eliseo Medina, the current secretary-treasurer of SEIU. 

Medina, who once worked for the illegal immigration-wary UFW, eventually joined SEIU and experienced representing an industry — especially janitors —that was increasingly populated by illegal workers. 

“The vast majority of them were undocumented, but boy, they were just as tough and willing to fight and courageous as any other set of workers,” Medina told TalkingPointsMemo in 2013. “But the situation was a huge problem, because you had to deal with the question on a regular basis of what happens if people get raided, arrested, and deported.”

Medina told the outlet that he began agitating for American labor organizations to revise their longtime opposition to illegal immigration as the percentage of illegal workers in his union’s fastest growing fields increased. The dam eventually broke, and AFL-CIO reversed its long-time opposition, calling for full amnesty for illegal workers by 2000.